Overall, 63 percent of cancer deaths among black men are caused by tobacco smoke, according to new research.

The results vary from region to region, however, the authors note, with tobacco to blame for 67 percent of cancer deaths in the South, 43 percent in the Northeast, 60 percent in the West, and 63 percent in the Midwest.

These findings add further evidence that “avoiding tobacco smoke exposure is clearly the biggest, and possibly the only, current way of avoiding premature cancer death, and likely many other premature deaths,” said study author Dr. Bruce N. Leistikow.

For the study, Leistikow and his colleague Dr. Alexander Tsodikov, both from the University of California, Davis, tracked the rate of lung cancer as an indicator of exposure to cigarette smoke from 1950 to 2001, as well as the rate of all cancer deaths among African-American men.

Reporting in the journal Preventive Medicine, the researchers found that, between 1950 and 1988, when exposure to cigarette smoke increased, the rates of death from lung and other cancers nearly tripled.

The fact that other cancers increased at roughly the same rate as lung cancer indicates that tobacco smoke was to blame for many cases of other cancers in black men, Leistikow noted.

“That suggests that cigarettes account for much more premature cancer deaths than previously recognized,” he added.

Leistikow explained that the percentage of cancer deaths due to tobacco varies from region to region likely because the tobacco epidemic started and peaked later, and rose higher, in the South and Midwest. Those regions may have also been somewhat slow to enact anti-tobacco interventions, he added.

“Continued smoking and premature cancer deaths in the South followed by the Midwest suggests that tobacco control - clean air laws, polluter-pays cigarette taxes, hard-hitting health department ads to counter cigarette company marketing to children, graphic warnings on cigarette packs - has been later and less in the South and Midwest,” Leistikow noted.

SOURCE: Preventive Medicine, August 2005.